An American Dreamland, From the Beginning

Somehow, she missed “Coney Island Baby,” the 1962 doo-wop hit by the Excellents. But Robin Jaffee Frank, who organized “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008,” has not missed much. A sprawling evocation of Brooklyn’s most famous — and sometimes infamous — locale installed at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, this clamorous multimedia exhibition mixes fine art, pop culture and history, juxtaposing shimmering beachscapes and gaudy carousel horses, Sunday comics and classic photographs, surreal paintings and vintage posters.

True, there’s no salt air or boardwalk, but there is a turn-of-the-century gambling wheel — pick a number, any number — and a piece of mural from the Spook-A-Rama ride (it belongs to Harvey Fierstein, along with several less lurid, puppetlike ball-toss targets). Video monitors placed throughout the museum’s renovated galleries show movie clips from periods ranging from the silent era to the 21st century.

Image

An 1898 poster.

The concatenation of objects and sounds lends the show some of the raucous energy of the place itself. It’s hard to imagine another exhibition bringing together Samuel S. Carr’s charming 1897 oil “Beach Scene,” with straw-hatted children playing in the sand, and Weegee’s startling 1944 photograph of Luna Park devastated by fire, an expanse of rubble spread below the framework of the roller coaster.

The show proceeds chronologically, with painters and photographers documenting the irresistible recreations offered by Coney Island as it goes from quiet resort to brassy pleasure dome to derelict, sometimes dangerous urban relic. Eventually, Carr’s well-heeled visitors in top hats give way to lounging teenagers in hoodies, and his prim 19th-century damsels under their parasols evolve into fleshy 1930s trollops falling out of their bathing suits.

Image

“Pip and Flip” (1932), by Reginald Marsh.CreditEstate of Reginald Marsh/Art Students League, New York, via Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

They in turn become curvy onlookers wearing halter tops as a diver hovers dramatically over green water in “Coney Island Pier,” a 1995 canvas by the onetime street artist Daze.

Artists have been drawing Coney Island from its beginnings, and Coney Island has been drawing filmmakers from the dawn of motion pictures. Movies, of course, seem best suited to capturing its wild rides and flashing lights, although a painting like Joseph Stella’s breathtaking abstraction “Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras,” with its powerful spikes and dizzying swirls, makes you question that assumption.

Still, movies have a lively presence in the Wadsworth exhibition, which includes snippets of Roscoe Arbuckle’s 1917 silent comedy “Fatty at Coney Island” and Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” from 1977, in which Alvy Singer’s childhood home under the roller coaster provides a comic metaphor for the trials and tribulations of growing up Woody. Claudette Colbert and Ray Milland flirt on the roller coaster in “The Gilded Lily,” from 1935.

But Coney Island isn’t always amusing on film. Thomas Edison’s camera recorded the disturbing 1903 electrocution of Topsy the elephant. And Darren Aronofsky’s dark 2000 drama, “Requiem for a Dream,” lends its title to the exhibition’s final section, devoted to the twilight years of Coney Island as an entertainment mecca.

That twilight was not unwarranted. It resulted in part from the deterioration of storied, not necessarily well-built attractions like Steeplechase Park, but also from an increasing distaste for the crass exploitation of people with medical conditions and congenital deformities in “freak” shows.

In its heyday, Coney Island was probably the world capital of gawking, and if you define gawking as intense looking, it’s what artists do. At Coney Island, they study the human figure massed into crowds (Marie Roberts comments wittily in her 2005 painting “A Congress of Curious Peoples”) or entwined on the beach (several such couples are captured in photographs by Morris Engel and Homer Page). They revel in the color and the chaos of manufactured amusements, and they marvel at the proximity of thrills to chills (Arnold Mesches offers a monster’s head opposite a giant ice cream cone in “Anomie 1991: Winged Victory”).

Reginald Marsh, that relentless painter of New York lowlife night life, can’t stay away from Coney Island — turning an expectant crowd into a rhythmic assemblage of arms and legs in “Adults 10 Cents, Children 5 Cents” (1936), turning a carousel ride into a stampede in “Wooden Horses” (1936) and turning the sidewalk outside a side show into a visual encyclopedia of gaping in “Pip and Flip” (1932).

Pip and Flip were actually Elvira and Jenny Snow, Georgia twins born with microcephaly, marketed in side shows as exotic “pinheads.” They turn up more than once at the Wadsworth, in Marsh’s painting and in a post card.

They are not the only subjects claiming the attention of painters and photographers alike. In another instance, the jam-packed beach photographed in black-and-white by Weegee in 1940 is duplicated by Red Grooms more than half a century later in pop-art colors and multilayered paper. Visitors are invited to elaborate further on the theme by adding themselves to the composition. And whether or not they stop to play with the colored pencils and magnetic paper dolls, they will almost certainly see their response to this show in the rapt onlookers at a fireworks display photographed by Bruce Davidson in 1962 — Coney Island babies all.

“Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008” is at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main Street, Hartford, through May 31. Information: 860-278-2670 or wadsworthatheneum.org.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page CT9 of the New York edition with the headline: An American Dreamland, From the Beginning. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe